How to Validate the Text Field in JSF

Question

Hi,
I am facing a issue to validate the text field where the below code accepts (space' ',underscore'_',pipe'|') symbol as a first character and last character.Where by it can accept in the middle.
It should not accept special characters also. Below code is working properly for special characters.
<tr>
<td width="30%" align="right"><b><h:outputText id="aAccrualType" value="Accrual Type" /> </b> <span style="color:red">*</span></td>
<td width="50%">: <h:inputText id="accrualType" value="#{accrualTypeMast.accrualType}" required="true" >          
<t:validateRegExpr pattern="^[(a-z)||(A-Z)||(0-9)||(_)||(\s)||(/)]+$" />     
<f:validateLength minimum="1" maximum="50"/>     
</h:inputText>
<h:message for="accrualType" showDetail="true" style="color:red" />
</td>
</tr>
The thing is i dont have much knowledge in regular expression.
Is there any other way to do this.
Could anyone help me in this.
Thanks,
Ambika&#9786;

Answer 1

This has nothing to do with JSF.
I suggest you to read the Pattern API documentation [1]. You can easily create a small Java Application and test the regexp using String#matches() as it uses the same regexp guidelines.
public static void main(String[] args) {
    String regexp = "^[a-z]+$";
    String value = "foo";
    boolean match = value.matches(regexp);
    System.out.println(value + " matches " + regexp + ": " + match);
}[1] http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html